Tanya Andrew

My art practice encompasses a wide variety of media but more often takes the form of painting and mono printing. I am drawn to the idiosyncrasies that surround us, my work questions how we make sense of these and relate to them in a wider social context. The main themes throughout my work focus on containment, boundaries and interrelationships.​In my paintings I will often work with earth and mineral pigments which I apply with coffee stirrers and bank cards, two apparently essential consumerist commodities of modern culture. The media and application seem to contradict one another. These juxtapositions interrelate on the canvas, where I look to counterbalance a contemporary predicament, the over consumption of Earth’s resources to satisfy humans needs. In this sense I feel my work reflects an existential struggle through abstraction.

Series 8, exhibited at The Thought Unknown, 2014.
eco pigment on canvas

​As an art therapist the visual aspect of my practice is key to responding to clients; through the artwork they make, the artwork I might make in response and how I work with visual clues in their communication between myself (the therapist) and their art.

Scapegoat, 2015, coincided with a new direction in my painting practice as I attempted to explore this relationship through portraiture. Our first experience of another looking at us will be of our (m)other’s gaze, what we see in others and how we reflect our emotions back to them, begins with the maternal gaze and this relationship shapes our experience of being human. Capturing the gaze of another’s face has been a learning curve in technique. The attentiveness and patience required to learn a new skill and remain committed to the process has been equally rewarding and frustrating. For Scapegoat, I worked on a painting titled, Pan, a reference to the greek god of nature considered half goat half man, whose distinctive features later became associated to that of the devil, the christian scapegoat for all that is evil and tempting.

Working with the theme of our latest exhibition A_Void, 2018, led me to reflect on what we may choose to not think or feel, when experiences or issues arise that may be too challenging to process and it can feel simpler to avoid them, to just not go there. Meeting as a collective and discussing issues that we have experienced helps to bring them back to the foreground, to understand them and share together; our despair, sadness and joy. Situations may not change but a shared understanding can bring greater perspective and help to ameliorate difficult feelings.

During the preparatory stage of the exhibition I had a vivid dream, where I found myself meeting David Attenborough on a hazy hillside, he walked towards me in a meadow and within his hands held many small green gems, like seeds. He told me that these were all mine to use and to not waste them as they were precious. Dreams can often hold multi layered meaning, in relation to the current exhibition theme and recent political preoccupations, I interpreted this dream as addressing my own avoidance, to not fear planting the seeds of creativity.

David, 2017
Mono-print on silk with gems

For some time I have been mulling over what to produce for the exhibition and my mind keeps wondering back to an idea I had when I first moved to London as an art student in my late teens. As I adjusted to the experience of moving to a city for the first time, I found walking the streets helped to process the cultural differences one step at a time. As my heightened senses took in the new environment I would often observe the different drain covers as I walked to art college. Back then I had the idea to take mono prints of them and over the following years I have often revisited this idea without actualising it. In essence it is the first artistic idea I avoided producing. For A_Void my intention is to revisit this idea and finally see it to fruition. The representation of the object, the drain cover, also intrigues me from the perspective that it covers what we have discarded. A decorative lid placed on the portals to an underground world, where fat bergs embody what we have jettisoned from our existence.